Thesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-Smith / Teachers have a powerful impact on student achievement, yet high attrition rates hinder schools in their ability to provide quality instruction. Attrition rates are highest for schools serving low-income, minority students and among small private schools, including Catholic schools. Attrition is especially prevalent among new teachers. Very few studies have focused on the problem of early leaving or the problem of retention in Catholic schools. This study seeks to understand better why public and Catholic school teachers leave teaching early. A mixed methods approach was used. This included 50 in-depth interviews with 15 public and 10 Catholic school teachers who left within the first 5 years. In addition, statistical analyses of public and Catholic school early leavers' responses in the Schools and Staffing and Teacher Follow-Up surveys were used to contextualize and compare the experiences of the 25 teachers interviewed to the larger population of early leavers. This dissertation argues that, to understand why teachers leave early, an approach that examines teachers' entire experiences throughout their short time in the profession is required. A framework informed by sociocultural and commitment theories and prior research on retention and the culture of schools was developed through systematic analysis of the interview and survey data. This analytical framework provides a complex approach for examining the phenomenon of early leaving, which included three aspects: entering commitment, teaching experience, and the decision to leave. Findings suggested that teachers' decisions to leave were influenced by multiple factors within their various contexts. These contexts and factors were constantly changing, making the decision to leave extremely complex. For Catholic school teachers, the decision was even more complicated, influenced not only by the same factors and aspects of early leaving as public school teachers, but also their changing identities as Catholics. Findings also called into question common assumptions about why teachers leave: teachers do not always leave because they are less committed to teaching, or are dissatisfied with teaching or with their salaries. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

There has been a significant increase in the number of Students of Color attending Catholic schools in the United States in the last forty years. However, only 17% of the professional staff in Catholic schools nationally are Teachers of Color (with about 9.6% identifying as Latino/a) (McDonald & Schultz, 2020). The racial gap between Students and Teachers of Color is a social justice issue (Berrios, 2016), and yet, research on why Teachers of Color are choosing to teach in Catholic urban schools and the motivating factors that sustain their work in hard-to-staff Catholic schools is limited. This qualitative research study was conducted using a Critical Race Methodology (CRM) grounded (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002) in two overarching theoretical frameworks: Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LatCrit). Critical Race Testimonio was used as a counter-story method to document the experiences of Latino/a Catholic school teachers who served in under-resourced urban Catholic schools (Perez Huber, 2008). This study was guided by three research questions: (a) what factors do Latino/a teachers describe as encouraging them to choose and sustain their urban Catholic school teaching profession; (b) how do Latino/a teachers describe their racialized experiences in urban Catholic schools; and (c) how can urban Catholic schools enhance recruitment and retention policies and practices to diversify their teaching workforce? This study explored the racialized experiences and factors which motivated, sustained, and contributed to Latino/a Catholic school teachers’ choices to work in under-resourced urban Catholic schools and highlighted the authority of Latino/a teacher epistemology and ontology to understand that if the demographics of Catholic schools continue to shift, the recruitment and retention practices of Latino/a teachers must also change to meet the needs of all students in urban Catholic schools.